Sympathy, empathy and compassion get used interchangeably. They describe three different things, and the difference decides how useful you are to the person in front of you.

Alex Couley draws out the mechanism that compassion shares with hope, which is where his own interest began. Sue Langley keeps the conversation in small examples, the kind available in an ordinary week.

The question running through it is what any of us can do to make the world a more compassionate place, starting with the next conversation you have.

Hope Works is a conversation series with Sue Langley and Alex Couley about the science, art and practice of wellbeing and positive psychology. Every episode arrives in the same place: the small things, the ones you could start in the next two minutes.

Sue brings a background in psychology and emotional intelligence. Alex brings lived experience, and the questions.

The mappiness studies asked people how they felt, wherever they happened to be at the time. Sitting in a park scored higher than sitting in an office, reliably enough to build a habit on.

Sue Langley and Alex Couley go into what the natural world does for physical, mental and emotional recovery. Sue works from a wide definition of nature as anything living, which opens the idea well past a weekend bushwalk and into the plants on a windowsill.

The place the episode arrives at is that we are nature, rather than visitors to it.

Hope Works is a conversation series with Sue Langley and Alex Couley about the science, art and practice of wellbeing and positive psychology. Every episode arrives in the same place: the small things, the ones you could start in the next two minutes.

Sue brings a background in psychology and emotional intelligence. Alex brings lived experience, and the questions.

Say the word creativity and most people picture Rembrandt, then decide it belongs to someone else. Meanwhile they are being creative all day and calling it something different.

Alex Couley's interest is in how much creativity people already use without naming it. He and Sue Langley separate creativity from curiosity and look at how each one feeds the other.

Sue sets people a challenge she describes here: find 30 seconds, one minute or five minutes in a day to be deliberately curious, and see what turns up. Curiosity is the cheaper of the two to start with, and it opens the door to the other one.

Hope Works is a conversation series with Sue Langley and Alex Couley about the science, art and practice of wellbeing and positive psychology. Every episode arrives in the same place: the small things, the ones you could start in the next two minutes.

Sue brings a background in psychology and emotional intelligence. Alex brings lived experience, and the questions.

Sue Langley's working definition is short. Emotions are data. Information arriving about something that matters to you.

She and Alex Couley take that through the chemistry, roughly 90 seconds of it moving through the brain and the body, and through Barbara Fredrickson's broaden and build theory, where leveraging a positive emotion builds the resources you draw on later.

The practical half of the conversation is about getting comfortable with the uncomfortable emotions, which is a different skill from trying to feel better. Gratitude comes into it, treated as evidence rather than as a pleasant idea.

Hope Works is a conversation series with Sue Langley and Alex Couley about the science, art and practice of wellbeing and positive psychology. Every episode arrives in the same place: the small things, the ones you could start in the next two minutes.

Sue brings a background in psychology and emotional intelligence. Alex brings lived experience, and the questions.

Meaning and purpose get used as though they were the same word. They behave differently, and the difference changes what you do on an ordinary Tuesday.

Alex Couley has a firm view about the advice that finding your purpose guarantees an easy life, and he says so. He and Sue Langley separate the two terms, look at where each one comes from, and arrive at something usable. In most days you can find 30 seconds that were worthwhile. Meaning is built out of those.

That is a very different proposition from a life mission, and a good deal more available on a Tuesday.

Hope Works is a conversation series with Sue Langley and Alex Couley about the science, art and practice of wellbeing and positive psychology. Every episode arrives in the same place: the small things, the ones you could start in the next two minutes.

Sue brings a background in psychology and emotional intelligence. Alex brings lived experience, and the questions.

Agency is the sense that your actions matter and that you have a say in what happens next. Sue Langley and Alex Couley look at how agency, choice and autonomy work together, and at what moves a person from waiting to moving.

The answer keeps coming back to scale. Choose the action you could finish in the next 20 minutes, then make it smaller again. Sue describes setting a timer for two minutes and asking people to spend that time on whatever they are trying to achieve. Most of them keep going once the timer stops.

This episode is about taking responsible action in weeks that feel heavy, and about how much the smallest things do.

Hope Works is a conversation series with Sue Langley and Alex Couley about the science, art and practice of wellbeing and positive psychology. Every episode arrives in the same place: the small things, the ones you could start in the next two minutes.

Sue brings a background in psychology and emotional intelligence. Alex brings lived experience, and the questions.

Hope behaves more like a skill than a mood. It has three parts: a possible future, a pathwaytowards it, and the belief that you can walk that pathway.  

In the first episode of Hope Works, Sue Langley and Alex Couley open the series by lookingat what hope actually is, why individual and collective hope both matter, andhow much the size of the first step decides. Sue gives groups two minutes on atimer and asks them to spend that time moving towards the thing they careabout. Two minutes turns out to be enough to begin. 

The through line of the whole series appears here for the first time. It is the smallactions that make the biggest difference. 

Hope Works is a conversation series with Sue Langley and Alex Couley about the science,art and practice of wellbeing and positive psychology. Every episode arrives inthe same place: the small things, the ones you could start in the next twominutes.  

Sue brings a background in psychology and emotional intelligence. Alex brings livedexperience, and the questions.

Join Alex Couley and Sue Langley for honest, insightful conversations about what it really means to care for your mind. Each episode dives into the science and stories behind mental health, wellbeing, and resilience exploring how our emotions, thoughts, and habits shape the way we live and work.

Drawing on Sue’s deep background in psychology and emotional intelligence, and Alex’s personal passion for mental wellness and connection, Hope Works brings together evidence-based tools, real experiences, and practical conversations to help you navigate life’s ups and downs.